How ‘our’ ABC fell for Clinton-fbi Russia hoax
So much for the story of the century. Remember that whole conspiracy that obsessed so much of the media – including the ABC – and claimed that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin?
Lies, all lies, revealed by US special counsel John Durham in a bombshell revelation. The basic outlines of Durham’s 305 page report go like this.
The Clinton campaign, worried about a surging Trump, comes up with the line that somehow the Republican candidate is colluding with Moscow.
To back it up, they channelled funds through their lawyer to pay for what became known as the Steele Dossier, an already debunked pile of rumours and innuendo.
Many of the claims in the dossier, including that the Russians had a tape of Trump being peed on by prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, were fed into the document by Clinton operatives. And to make it all more weird, while intelligence officials knew that the Clinton camp had a scheme to launch phony claims about Trump and Russia to destabilise the campaign, they still launched a full-scale investigation, lending credibility to the claims.
This was all too good to be true for a left-leaning media in the US, where papers like the New York Times and Washington Post monetised their readers’ hatred of Trump into a profitable business model.
Naturally, “our” ABC was keen to get in on the act. At ABC HQ, Russian collusion was taken as an article of faith. News reports trumpeted the theory. The ABC launched a podcast (still running today) called Russia, If You’re Listening, whose first episode asked: “What if Trump was caught in a Russian web, long before he even considered a career in politics?”
But the high (or low) watermark came via a three-part Four Corners special presented by Sarah Ferguson that travelled around the world looking into the “extraordinary allegations” (the ABC’S words) “that members of the Trump team, including possibly the President himself, actively colluded with Russia to subvert American democracy”.
In fairness, Ferguson talked to a number of people who thought the Russian collusion angle was complete nonsense. But they were never presented sympathetically. The whole point was to suggest they were stooges in a sinister plot to see
Donald Trump installed in the Oval Office with Vladimir Putin in the role of puppet master, pulling the strings.
Instead, the three-parter went back again and again to the true believers like anti-trump journalist Michael Isikoff to hammer home the message : well, we can’t prove it but this whole thing stinks pretty bad.
Well, it did stink. Just not in the way probably nine out of 10 journalists thought at the time.
For all the hyperventilating about Trump being a threat to democracy, this was a real effort to first swing an election and, then when that failed, delegitimise a president. Durham’s report makes this clear, forensically documenting the way in which FBI agents did everything they could to protect the Clinton campaign and the, ahem, “charitable” Clinton Foundation while unfairly and improperly targeting the Trump campaign on the basis of unsupported rumour.
And now we have conclusive proof that the whole thing was indeed made up, advanced by armed bureaucrats at the FBI and other so-called “alphabet agencies” who, along with an all too credulous and biased media, decided it was up to them to protect America from Trump.
We know the feds had a slowwalking investigation into Hunter Biden and that the Biden campaign colluded with the CIA to put out the lie that Hunter’s laptop was a sophisticated piece of Russian “disinformation”.
Less credulous or biased journos might look at all this and ask, “how come?”, rather than take gross rumours about Trump and kinky
hotel room antics at face value.
Kudos to the ABC for at least allowing a newswire report conceding that Durham’s review found that “US and law enforcement did not possess any actual evidence of collusion between Mr Trump’s campaign and Russia prior to launching” their investigation into the Trump campaign onto their website.
But it is now over to ABC management to decide whether it is worth risking the wrath of the staffrun collective that is its Ultimo headquarters to append a correction or retract the Four Corners report. The question of whether taxpayers ever get a refund for this nonsense is, of course, a foregone conclusion.